Darker Than Any Shadow - By Tina Whittle Page 0,21
didn’t do it, who did?”
Rico leveled a look at me over his sunglasses. “You got ideas about that?”
I sucked on the ice cubes, and told him about the scene in the hallway, including Jackson’s anger, the phone call from the “lady friend,” and Lex’s smug threats. Do you really want to play it this way, Jackson? Really?
“You told the cops this?”
“They already knew most of it.”
“Right. That’s exactly what they want you to think.”
Suddenly he was aligning me with the APD, like I’d chosen sides. I gave up. There was no talking sense with him when he started on one of his diatribes. Then it hit me.
“Wait a minute, why’d you go in anyway? You weren’t being arrested. Unless they had paper, you didn’t have to go. You know that, you’re always bellowing about The Man and our Constitutional rights.”
A shrug, eyes still veiled behind the sunglasses. “So?”
“So why’d you even hang around, Rico? Why didn’t you get the hell out of Dodge the second you cleared the restaurant?”
He shrugged again. And then I understood.
“You’re covering for someone.”
He didn’t deny it. But he did take his sunglasses off and rub his eyes. I saw exhaustion there, but also a resolute firmness.
“Tai, baby, what do you want me to do? Tell you everything? So that you’re then legally compelled to go tell your law-and-order boyfriend, who will have to—as required by his law-and-order brain—tell the cops?”
“I want you to stay out of jail, that’s what I want!”
“I did. And I will.”
“It’s Cricket, isn’t it? She and Lex were having an affair, and now you’re all knight-in-shining-armor to protect her.”
Rico looked at me like I’d lost my mind. “You’re not serious.”
“I’m dead serious! He was staying at their house! She—”
“The answer is no. Look, a poetry group is tight. It has to be. Sometimes things happen, it’s true. But not those two. No way, no how.”
“Like you’d notice. You’re a guy.”
“Drop it, baby girl. Wrong tree.”
I let the question go for the time being, but I knew I was onto something. I remembered Lex’s taunts, Jackson’s anger, Cricket’s emotional discombobulation. Something had been up with her long before fire and murder mucked up the evening. And whatever it was, she and Lex and Jackson were all in it together. And now Rico was too.
He took another sip of coffee. “They know what killed him yet?”
“The paper says they haven’t found the murder weapon, and I’m assuming they did the usual and checked the dumpster and the hedges and the parking lot.”
“Knife’s probably in the sewer now. Or the river. The Chattahoochee is probably clogged with bloody knives this time of year.”
He had a point. Atlanta was the second most crime-ridden city in the US, but the majority of the incidents were property crimes, not homicide. During the summer, however, things burned. Things combusted. Things snapped.
“It takes deep hatred to stick a knife in somebody’s heart,” I said.
“Can’t say the boy didn’t have it coming.”
There was an angry edge to his words, and something else too—satisfaction. I pulled his head around so I could look him in the eye. “So Lex was trying to frame you. Was he blackmailing you too?”
“Trey been teaching you that bullshit detector trick?”
“Stop changing the subject. Did Lex have something on you?”
Rico jammed his sunglasses back on. “No.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing. Lex was causing trouble because it was the last card he had to play to stay on the team. That’s the whole story.”
“You could have gone to the cops, you know.”
“Now you sound like Trey. The cops would love for me to drop a motive in their lap. Less work, more time at the snack machine.”
“I meant before the murder, when it was only blackmail.”
“There was no blackmail because I didn’t do anything he could blackmail me with! I told you, Lex was a team problem. We were going to handle him as a team.”
“What about Vigil? The almost-felon with a taste for switchblades? Now there’s somebody with a motive, losing his place on the team to some newbie who winds up dead at the debut party.”
“Except that Vigil wasn’t there last night.”
I pulled Trey’s diagram up in my mind. “He could have come in the back way, through the parking lot. Gone right into the bathroom without ever coming into the main room.”
“Could have, might have, would have—the cops don’t give a shit. They got me, at the scene, with a motive, and blood on my shoes. I’m looking like O. J. Simpson to them.”